Electronic devices and systems are frequently relied upon to provide information to users. Content providers and distributors naturally desire to track usage of that content. Content providers and advertisers rely on tracking content use and advertisement use on the Internet to determine appropriate distribution and pricing schemes and to identify relevant content and ads to present to particular users. Providers of paid content typically either offer subscriptions to periodicals or content libraries and/or offer per item pricing for particular publications.
Presently available systems for tracking content usage typically determine whether a particular piece of content was accessed by a user by, for example, tracking page hits for freely available content and tracking purchases of and/or logins to restricted access content. Also, techniques have been proposed for determining and tracking certain types of interactions with webpage content such as scrolling (see, for example, “Advanced Content Tracking with Google Analytics: part 1” posted Feb. 21, 2012 at http://cutroni.com/blog/2012/02/21/advanced-content-tracking-with-google-analytics-part-1/#wrap).